Australia’s most trusted research platform

Secure Unified Research Environment

SURE (Secure Unified Research Environment) is a secure and powerful platform for the sharing and analysis of sensitive health and other data.

SURE puts the right data in the right hands – offering custodians a flexible and trusted way to share health data with the research community, while also giving researchers access to approved linked data.

Independently managed by the Sax Institute, this national asset is used by over 500 researchers, and more than 25 government and health data custodians across Australia.

What SURE offers data custodians

  • A safe setting offering data controls that meet the highest data governance and security requirements
  • Adherence to the Five Safes framework – safe people, projects, settings, data and outputs
  • Flexible controls to suit the needs of each data custodian
  • Controlled outputs via the SURE Curated Gateway that provides for robust review of information entering or leaving SURE
  • A nationally-recognised platform that hosts sensitive health data from 25 data custodians from all Australian states and territories.

What SURE offers researchers

  • Fast and reliable access to linked health data from hospitals, Medicare, cancer registries, and more
  • A virtual workspace for analysing data and sharing findings with remote research teams and overseas collaborators
  • Up-to-date hardware, including GPUs and high specification virtual machines, available for as little as one month
  • New, lower and more flexible fees to align with how researchers work
  •  Access to standard analysis software such as SAS, Stata, R, Python and SPSS included in SURE fees
  • Windows or Linux virtual machines to accommodate non-standard software requirements
  • The ability to manage relational databases using SQL server software

Contact us

To begin working with SURE, or to discuss your research needs, please contact us at sure-admin@saxinstitute.org.au

SURE provides an amazing opportunity for researchers to access data that wouldn’t otherwise be available to us. It also gives data custodians the confidence to be able to release data to researchers.

Dr Emily Callander

Health Economist at Griffith University and SURE user

Our Partners

SURE is operated by the Sax Institute and is supported by the Population Health Research Network which is an initiative of the Australian Government National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) and the NSW Government.

Summary of Requirements, Assessments and Enhancements

The Summary of Requirements, Assessments and Enhancements is a summary report on the SURE Enhancement Project, prepared in coordination with the project funder, the PHRN, and the Project Control Group.

SURE is operated by the Sax Institute and is supported by the Population Health Research Network which is an initiative of the Australian Government National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) and the NSW Government.